2014 has been a great year for new media startups. At least as compared to 2013. We saw a few startups raising funds, big names quitting to launch their own startups and overseas publishers showing interest in India. All that pessimism around the death of journalism might be a bit out of proportion after all! Here’s a quick recap. Media startups that raised funds in 2014 View image | gettyimages.com ScoopWhoop: This site which follows the footsteps of Upworthy, raised $1.6 million from Bharti Softbank, a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises & Japan’s SoftBank. A valuation of about Rs 30 cr for a startup just over…

The idea of grabbing a readers attention and not just clicks or views is being pushed by Charbeat, an analytics company for web publishers. Some of the biggest publishers, especially the ones that serve premium content, are taking to it. View image | gettyimages.com At Medium, the shiny new publishing platform of the internet, they have a metric– it’s called total time reading. It’s an estimate of how much time readers spent reading a post on Medium. By the looks of it, total time reading is the only real metric they care about. Which means that it is the metric…

Journalism jobs have been dissappearing. But thankfully, new jobs have come. But those may not last either. A lot of news is being written by robots these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Here’s a video that explains the jobless future that awaits the world. If there is one video you should watch today, it is this.

Indian newspapers are sitting on a goldmine. Here’s what I’m thinking: App and consumer electronics consumption in India is growing. The app market in India is estimated to be worth over $450 mn by 2016. And we have the world’s fastest growing smartphone market. Most newspapers have a technology section which is dominated by coverage of consumer electronics and apps. After reading, if the subscriber likes it, he goes on to one of the app stores and downloads the app. End of story. Now one way of monetizing the print real estate is to sell vanilla ads. The other, is where…

Latest figures from the Indian readership survey and the chest thumping, grandstanding, front page proclamations that followed, will have you believe that Indian newspapers, unlike their western peers, are doing quite well. But then again, the Internet is emerging fast and perhaps five years from now, the numbers will look very different. Someday, when the internet becomes as powerful and prevalent in India as it is in the west, this advertisement might make more sense. But it really is a sign of things to come. Cheers, JPK

(Kodak advertisement, Image courtesy: Duke Universityhttp://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa/, link Via Chandu Gopalakrishnan)Hope you have finished mourning the demise of Eastman Kodak Co, the 131 year old photography pioneering corporation that filed for bankruptcy Thursday. Kodak’s bankruptcy offers a few lessons to businesses, The Economist explains in an article. The lessons?1. Kodak’s culture did not help. Despite its strengths—hefty investment in research, a rigorous approach to manufacturing and good relations with its local community—Kodak had become a complacent monopolist.2. If you see things coming, do something about it: Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a…

Dear readers, What do you think of SOPA? PIPA?I found this interesting. Enjoy:INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does forthe ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first personto own the copyright to a motion picture.Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion picturesin the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to…

Rather abruptly, Midday, the English tabloid owned by Jagaran group has announced the closure of its Bangalore and Delhi Edition. Manajit Ghoshal, CEO of Mid-Day Infomedia Ltd wrote to his employees: Dear Colleagues,Its with a heavy heart that I have to announce the closure of Midday – Delhi and Midday – Bangalore editions. Tomorrow’s issue will be the last issue for both the editions. This has been necessitated by the prolonged losses we had to incur on these editions. The idea behind starting these editions was to establish these brands in these cities and make a difference in the lives…

(Facsimile courtesy: www.expressbuzz.com)Chennai head-quartered national daily, The New Indian Express, has canned its Saturday supplement “Zeitgeist.” The supplement used to cover Gaming and Graphic Novels, Sexualities and other contemporary issues. Earlier, Aditya Sinha, who was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of The New Indian Express in April 2007, had left the organisation to join DNA as the editor in chief.

Here’s a copy of the e-mail sent out by Hardev Sanotra, Managing Editor of Financial World to its employees. The media house which was to bring out the new financial daily, had a change of plans and decided not to launch Financial World. Dear FW team,Hi. It’s bad news for all of us.Tarun Tejpal this afternoon addressed the staff in Delhi and in essence said that the FW project was off. He said that efforts were made to make it possible to keep the project going but it was not possible. There were mistakes made in senior hiring, and the…